Once the Toast, Now a Target, 'Silver Palate' Star Goes Solo

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THEY were a team. Jetting about in the high-altitude 80's, they invaded America's kitchens with boundless ebullience and a simple notion: homemade food could be both elegant and accessible. Medical students, law clerks and Wall Street Turks born with baked-bean-and-beer palates and a thousand thumbs were suddenly levitating over visions of raspberry vinegar and linen-draped tables set for four. It was salvation at the stove.

Sheila Lukins and Julee Rosso, the co-creators of the Silver Palate, the wildly successful upscale food shop in Manhattan, helped to revolutionize a generation's eating habits. But their high-profile pairing, which resulted in cookbooks that have sold 4.5 million copies, has come to a bitter end. The two women haven't spoken in a year. And Ms. Rosso, who has just published her first solo cookbook, is now the target of intense criticism from some fellow food professionals who say the 574-page low-fat tome is well-meaning, but a mess.

The business was sold in 1988, and the two went their separate ways. The problems didn't really start till later.

Ms. Lukins, after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage and nearly dying in 1991, recovered and took on an ambitious cookbook project that has propelled her around the world. Ms. Rosso moved to Michigan, back to her roots, to a new marriage and a new cookbook of her own. Her "Great Good Food," a low-fat guide book packed with more than 800 recipes, was released last month by Crown Publishers. Launched upon the cookbook sea with an advance of more than $500,000 (and another $200,000 for promotion), it is already topping some best-seller lists and is moving so quickly through its first printing of 300,000 copies that it may already be in the black.

Although the book has received some glowing reviews, there is also a sense among some food professionals that it is filled with flaws. Some complaints come from magazine editors who have tested the recipes and found them wanting. Few of them are willing to print what they have found. Several national magazines, discovering that everything from appetizers to desserts weren't working out, simply killed their stories rather than getting embroiled in the debate.

"We tested nine recipes, and two were acceptable, and the seven others ranged from disastrous to not worth bothering with," said Mark Bittman, the executive editor of Cook's Illustrated Magazine, which will be reviewing the book in its next issue. He ticked off a series of complaints: a recipe with an estimated preparation time of 30 minutes that he said took a professional tester more than two hours to make; a recipe for creme brulee that he scorned as "a sugar fix and little else," and another, for low-fat guacamole, which he called "a real hoax in terms of the serving size" because it artificially reduced the fat content by defining one serving as a single teaspoon. "This is one of the worst cookbooks I've reviewed in years," he said.

Ms. Rosso said she does not take such criticism lightly but allowed that food "is personal stuff." During her book tour, she added, "I'm hearing people who have been thrilled with what they have been cooking. So people should decide for themselves."

Some reviewers have championed the idea of the next generation of Silver Palate-styled pleasures. The Washington Post's Food section praised the book for "taking us where we want to go," while Steven Pratt of The Chicago Tribune told readers it was a "thorough, well-thought-out cookbook, bulging with doable recipes." But JeanMarie Brownson, the director of The Tribune's test kitchen who tested therecipes, said: "They were acceptable. I'm not going to cook them at home."

Ms. Rosso, through it all, seems unfazed. Spinning through a 44-city promotion tour, signing books and sharing cooking tips, she said she had heard nothing but praise for "Great Good Food." The bad reactions, she said, could be excess angst from a closed-circuit world of food fanatics.

"I like the fact that I have a distance from the foodies," she said late last month over grilled fish at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Palm Beach, Fla. "New York is a small world. Given the chance to snipe, there are people who will snipe."

Joni Evans, the publishing executive who bought "Great Good Food" at auction last year, said she was mystified by the sour reactions. "Julee is extraordinary," she said. "And her integrity about her food has been exceptional. You never saw anybody work like that. Could it be jealousy?"

Perhaps. There is a lot at stake.

Ms. Rosso believes the final verdict will be good: "This is real food, food that you can make every day. People come up to me, and they say, 'I go through the book, and there are so many things I want to make!' "

Driven by the joy of discovery, Ms. Rosso said she worked with four assistants to test 1,500 recipes, saving only the top 800. "I'm obsessed and possessed," she said. "I was focusing on flavors like I've never focused on flavors before. It was a question of suddenly understanding vanilla!"

That, her critics say, may be precisely where the book's greatest weakness lies. "I heard her on the radio this morning," said Suzanne Hamlin, a New York food writer who praised Ms. Rosso's marketing abilities but not her cooking. "She started talking about these wonderful things she'd discovered like yogurt cheese, which has been around for 20 years. The fact is, Julee was never the cook."

Ms. Rosso said she was self-taught but endlessly inspired. It was she, she said -- "Moi, me, at home" -- who came up with all the recipes. She worked like a madwoman, she said, rising before dawn, wheeling through farmers' markets, cutting, chopping, directing, tasting and perfecting.

Yet some food experts contend that it would be virtually impossible to test 1,500 recipes in just 10 months. "Any food writer or cook will tell you it might take you 14 tries to get to where you want to get on a recipe," Ms. Hamlin said.

Ms. Lukins, who said she had not read her former partner's book, literally raised one of her eyebrows. "You mean to tell me she's saying she tested that many in 10 months?" she said. "Give me a break."

Katherine L. Keck, one of Ms. Rosso's assistants, when asked to describe the process, chose not to. "Julee asked us not to talk about anything about the book," she said.

Yet "Great Good Food" was always at the very least a good idea. Even those eager to condemn Ms. Rosso's food can find nothing but praise for her genius in the hot skillet that is marketing. It was, they all agree, her greatest gift to the Silver Palate empire.

Arriving in New York City two days after her college graduation (after turning down a job with the Central Intelligence Agency), Ms. Rosso quickly turned her talents to advertising. She met Ms. Lukins, then a struggling caterer, when she hired her to cater a press breakfast in 1976. "I remember meeting her at, like, 5 in the morning, and there was still dew on her hydrangeas," Ms. Rosso said.

Ms. Lukins remembers the meeting, too. "I had put all this wild stuff together, and I met her, and it was like, ta da," she said in her chintz-splashed apartment at the Dakota. The two women liked each other instantly. A short while later, Ms. Rosso proposed a store.

"I said, 'No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No,' " Ms. Lukins said. "I was a dilettante. I had a great reputation, but I really didn't have a career." Ms. Rosso persuaded her to take the plunge. "She was a lot of fun," Ms. Lukins recalled. "She loved food. She had tremendous drive. She was great at marketing. I was the cook."

Others say the same thing. Sarah Leah Chase, a caterer in Nantucket, Mass., moved to New York in the 1980's to work with Ms. Lukins and Ms. Rosso in the development of "The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook," published by Workman.

"Sheila did recipes," Ms. Chase said. "I did recipes. Julee was the idea person. She was wonderful with ideas. But I think it was quite well known that she didn't cook."

But Ms. Rosso did help to write the text. Ms. Chase paused, then chose her words carefully. "Let me say that she's the Milli Vanilli of the cookbook world," she said. "A lot of the text when she handed it in, well, we had seen it before. It wasn't original. So those parts had to go. I know Julee was called in by Workman and given a stern warning."

Peter Workman, the head of Workman Publishers, would not comment on Ms. Chase's recollections. "You can't talk about editorial process," he said. "I just wouldn't want to." Ms. Rosso also declined to comment.

After the sale of the Silver Palate in 1988, Ms. Rosso went home to Michigan, married a builder and decided to get the heck out of the fast lane.

That didn't happen. Instead, she started a newsletter called Cook's Notes that resulted in burning some bridges to Manhattan. Ms. Chase complained that at least one of the recipes from the newsletter was hers.

"I had just finished my own cookbook," Ms. Chase said. "I had a recipe for onion soup that started with a quote from Esquire magazine. She used the same quote and duped the recipe with only minor changes."

Ms. Chase's recipe included onions, Cheddar cheese and cider. So did Ms. Rosso's. Ms. Chase was not pleased, though food writers say that the fine line between borrowing and originality is often hard to draw.

Ms. Rosso denies having copied the recipe and explains that she collects quotes "like crazy" so any duplication came by accident. The recipe, she said, was a natural pairing of Cheddar cheese and apple. "I don't feel that I've ever ripped Sarah off."

Ms. Lukins's complaints were far more personal. While recovering last spring from the brain hemorrhage she suffered the winter before, she was distraught, she said, to read about her ailment in a letter sent to all subscribers of Ms. Rosso's Cook's Notes. The May 12 letter apologized for delays in distribution and explained that Ms. Lukins (who had no role in the newsletter) had fallen gravely ill. "Every day," the note explained, "she's a bit better, but, needless to say when one foot is lame, the other has to work a bit harder."

Ms. Lukins still remembers the moment when she first read it. "For all the years that we had been together, good and bad, this just devastated me," she said. "She was using my illness as her excuse. It was just incredibly hurtful."

The end came then. The two have not spoken since. Ms. Rosso says she bears no hard feelings toward her former partner. She rues the day the letter landed in subscribers' mail slots. She said it was written by an assistant who put it on her Saugatuck, Mich., stationery and lifted her signature from other documents. "I didn't sign it," she said. "I didn't write it. It wasn't great. But it's still my responsibility."

For a long time, though, the collaboration had worked, and the friendship had held. "They created a look and graphic style that people could identify with," said Rozanne Gold, the culinary director of the Joseph Baum & Michael Whiteman Company. "They made sun-dried tomatoes a household word. They made basil approachable."

They made vinegar fun.

Now, Ms. Rosso has a best seller. Ms. Lukins is completing her own book, scheduled to be published next year by Workman. The Silver Palate books still warp and curl and pick up stains on kitchen counters. The pair's Chicken Marbella is a classic. But so too, now, is their food fight.

A version of this article appears in print on June 9, 1993, on Page C00001 of the National edition with the headline: Once the Toast, Now a Target, 'Silver Palate' Star Goes Solo. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe